You know, I’ve had it completely with BlogRush. As far as I’m concerned John Reese can go get bent. Why? Well, this is a service that was so poorly rolled out that after I announced it right here on OMB I had to modify my post within 1 day. That is the ONLY time I’ve had to do that in over 850 posts.
Well, a few days ago John Reese sends this e-mail out to the world explaining that he knows there were some serious problems with the initial launch and that they are making a bunch of changes to clean up the site, and so on, and so forth.
So, like a sucker I thought I’d give them one more chance to redeem themselves and put the widget back in the sidebar. Within a very short period of time I was already noticing that there were porn links appearing in my sidebar, so I removed the widget.
Now, flash forward to today – when I don’t even have the widget on my site- and I get the following notice telling me that my content “did not pass our Quality Review criteria”. HA!
Here is a little excerpt from the e-mail they sent:
On 22 Oct 2007 05:01:15 -0000, BlogRush (system@blogrush.com) wrote:
We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.You will notice that the widget no longer loads on your pages — please remove the BlogRush code from your blog for now.
We recently reviewed your blog(s) located at:
We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. The primary reason(s) your blog(s) did not meet our guidelines:
Inappropriate Content Or Advertising: Gambling
So, I can only assume that some monkey banging on a typewriter came across my article Online Roulette Game and Basic Roulette Strategy and labeled my site as a Gambling site! Brilliant.
“Strict Quality Guidelines” my ass. Yet again BlogRush proves itself to be the most worthless, overhyped service ever launched on the Internet. So thanks, but no F’ing thanks!
Thanks BigDadGib. :-)
By the way, I would check my stats if I were you and see if you are even getting any inbound traffic from BlogRush. I don’t know anyone who was actually getting traffic to their blog, though they were leaving the widget up all the time. But whatever statistics you use should let you know who the top referrers are.
Take care,
John
It is NOT right!
It’s like wearing a patch on your shirt that says “blogrush†and then one day, they come along and tear the patch off your shirt and say “Your shirt is not good enough to have this patch on it.â€Â
Who made them the judge and jury for what is a good blog and what is not-so-good.
I’m thinking of pulling the widget myself off my blog!
ps, you have a great blog here!
John,
I sincerely meant no disrespect in my last posting and, even though I am not directly involved with the approval dept, I have reviewed your blog and have personally re-instated it back into our service. I know, “big whoop!” you’re saying, but we absolutely do care about our customers using our free widget and we care solely about increasing the quality of traffic you can receive from it. You have great content here but maybe our reviewers thought your widget placement was too low and, widgets that are placed too low, are subject to get axed. It has nothing to do with the quality of content in some cases. This blog being one of those cases. I personally think you have a great blog here and that you’re actually providing content that can help people improve their lives. In this case I believe we made a mistake and would like to personally welcome you back in if you’d like to join. As you can image, we feel like Sisyphis trying to keep the boulder moving uphill for all bloggers large and small. And we’re not giving up. All we can do is keep improving while we transition out of our public beta.
Keep in mind that the traffic the widget lends itself to is extremely valuable because it attracts people who are actively reading blogs, not just random surfers. Who knows what even a small amount of this type of traffic can bring you in the long run? Our only purpose in developing BlogRush is to help you, the blogger, network with other bloggers and blog readers interested in your area of expertise and to help you expand your communication within the Blogosphere. Period.
We hope that you’ll one day find value in including the free widget on your blog and we hope these new changes in our system can provide you with more traffic than you were receiving before, no matter how large or small that might be.
Thanks!
Gavin,
Thanks for stopping by. You know, there are people who are saying that BlogRush did this JUST to get a bunch of people pissed off and talking about and linking to the site. If this is not true, then it was a very big oversight indeed to ban some extremely popular blogs with appropriate content.
With regards to the traffic, I’ve fed the BlogRush widget to more than 20,000 page views per day in the past, and in return I haven’t even noticed a handful of visits. So, frankly I just don’t believe that you will ever return as many views as you were given.
Finally, if you recognize that OMB is an appropriate site for the BR widget, why in God’s name would you tell me to “resubmit” my blog? Why would you not go in and change your system? That is just absurd.
I mean first you insult me by telling me that my high quality blog, which represents incredible numbers of hour of work, is “not up to BlogRush standards” then you come here and tell me on my own damn blog that I can “reapply”? Inconceivable.
John
Hehehe. Well, glad we’re making lemonade out of the lemons they’ve handed us!
John
I never sensed any good from blog rush. It had a great viral tactic but it failed in technical details… too bad…
S.
Gavin Morrissey from the BlogRush team here,
We’re not really sure why your blog was rejected. It seems like you have good content here. Please understand our system is MASSIVE and, in the purging process, sure, there were some blogs that may have not been approved for a number of reasons. You can always resubmit your blog in the future as we attempt to eliminate spam and increase click rates that will ultimately bring more traffic to your blog in the long run. I can assure you though that there is no “conspiracy” or a “black list” that we are formulating to quell BR basher. Although I will admit, it does make for good blog fodder!
The BR system is very complicated and VERY large (remember, we don ‘t just serve marketing blogs – which is actually the category with the highest abuse – go figure) and we are trying everything in our power to bring your click rates up as soon as we can. As you can imagine, it’s a very difficult task given the sheer size of the Blogoshphere – especially in this category. We will be coming out with some great new tools and stats here in the next few days and I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Stay tuned! Good changes are on the way!
Probalby some other monkeys saw several paid reviews I did this month and imagined the whole blog is full of that. But thanks to them, I discovered your blog, and I like it that much that I really need to thank the monkey who put us in the same boat :)
Simonne,
I can’t even imagine why they would have sent you that declination. At least I’ve actually posted a couple of flash games on my site that some monkey probably read about gambling theory. But your blog… I’m just speechless!
Take care,
John
There are so many good blogs in this situation, that it becomes very clear that BlogRush is not worthy of our sidebars. I also had removed their widget and when thinking to give them a second chance and put it back, I’ve got that letter.
Wow. Unbelievable. It’s like they were purposely targeting some of the sites that actually sent them referrals so that they could get out of paying them credits.
The only other explanation is that they had monkeys “evaluating” the content. There is not a person on earth, not a single one, who would claim that OMB is a gambling site. I mean, if it is, where is all my damn money!?! :-)
John
Oh John you’re not alone. Amazingly I was spared this blog ‘cleansing’ despite never having used the widget, though JohnCow and even Techipedia were not. Simply amazing … they are actively alienating popular sites with original content. Absurd.
interesting, that means my webbie is `popular`. As I received a few hits from Blogrush. Yet, I barely had a few page views with it. That is due to the fact, that I removed the widget quite quickly, just because it was too big and didn’t fit my sidebar.
It’s really an example of how so-called “good” ideas can thrive and whither in the blogosphere. BlogRush’s rise was amazing, showing how the blogsphere can give a good idea a chance, but with behavior like this (i.e. poor execution and management), a great idea can die just as quick.
Ridiculous… they don’t seem to understand that the top blogs out there (like OMB) accounts for a large percent of the best quality out there… what’s it called? Oh yeah, the 80-20 rule! 20% of the blogs create 80% of the best content and traffic.
Hmmm. Good catch Kim. I’m not sure what the heck is causing that on this page because the others see to be working normally. I’ll keep an eye on it to see if other pages get messed up.
John
That is awesome! They are bragging about removing OMB! Classic.
John
There is nothing wrong with your blog.
The problem lies within BlogRushs sloppy business practices and complete disregard for how to treat people.
For some reason “Recent Related Posts” pops up twice for me on this page…
Tags: Advertising, BlogRush, Site Updates, WordPress
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MASSIVE OMB Update Complete! – October 9th, 2007
No More Ads for Regular Readers of OMB! – October 8th, 2007
Kim:)
Wow that’s really pathetic on their part. My blog was accepted, but I honestly couldn’t care less. I’ve had the blogrush widget on my site for atleast two weeks now and I have only got one single view from it. I’ll give it another two weeks, but I doubt it will do anything substantial in that time. More than likely, blogrush is coming off my site as well.
I was all for BlogRush when it came out, I sent an email out to all our members suggestion they give it a try.
I just removed the widget last night from all my sites, I’ve seen Zero traffic from it, and the links on my site are to spammy trashy sites.
I’ll still follow them for a few more weeks to see if this “phase 2” will make a difference, but for me, I’m with you John.. screw BR :p
That’s just crazy! And here I was trusting in their weeding out ‘bad blogs’! Ha!
You’re not the first to bash BlogRush.. but this is sad. I’ve always viewed this blog as a more mature blog as well. You definitely shouldn’t be slighted for inappropriate content. All I can say to them is, “Sorry for your loss”.
Well I guess their Quality Service department didn’t look too much at the context of your site (how it covers a broad range of topics, hopefully from a somewhat objective vantage point). Oh well, it’s probably best that you figured out that you don’t need them (while they don’t want you). I’m glad that I never did try it out, I had been waiting for results of the initial burst to come in. And it looks like it’s going to be a negative.
I thought about commenting, but I’m wordless…
Anyway, I just noticed I got this:
An Important BlogRush News Update…
– Congratulations!
– 10,000+ Blogs Removed From BlogRush
– Phase 2 Being Deployed
– Busy Week Ahead!
————————————————————-
Congratulations!
————————————————————-
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict
Quality Guidelines and criteria — we believe you have a high-quality
blog and we are happy you’re a member of our network!
Sounds like a very dodgy site / project.
Good thing you didnt waste too much time / traffic on them. And thanks for the warning.
Kim:)
I haven’t been kicked out (and seriously, there are SO many complete crap blogs out there and they took yours out? Sheesh!) but I haven’t been getting traffic either so I’m taking the widget away.